Having failed to achieve many of the democratic challenges of education, which were posed with urgency to the Portuguese society after the revolution of April 1974, the educational system began to move, in the last two decades, towards more (re)meritocratic and performative logics. The more recent pressure for the introduction of new mechanisms of accountability in the education system is in line with the introduction of partial forms of accountability (Afonso, 2014), resulting mainly from the implementation of national exams and standardised tests, and the correlative scrutiny that stems from the publication of rankings based on the results obtained in these tests.

If the impact of the rankings in itself contained publicity elements of the performance of schools in the external plan (national, regional and local), it was, however, also necessary to highlight the academic performance of students at the internal and local level. The ritualisation of the school excellence of students is now an institutional marketing strategy, considered an important part in attracting the best students, against a backdrop of sharp demographic decline of the Portuguese school age population. The place of the school in the rankings, the boards and the rituals of academic distinction of the best students, and the placement of these students in socially more prestigious higher education courses emerge as the most consistent indicators for the promotion of the social image of the school institution, all this having school results as a common denominator.

From the 1980s, academic excellence has become a recurring theme in political discourses on education, assuming an increasing importance when associated with the concerns relating to the quality, competitiveness, merit and effectiveness of the educational system. At the European level, the priority tended to focus on the development of competitive educational systems, regulated by the economic interests and needs of the market and by forms of effective governance and consistent performance (Ball, 2000; Ward, 2012). In the political orientations mainly supported by certain sectors of the ruling classes and the middle classes, the political emphasis placed on the production of educational outcomes was accompanied by the pressure for the reconfiguration of the mission of state schools, progressively more hostage of individual performance and accountability based on the publication of evaluation results and standardised tests (meritocratic mandate) and less involved in the consolidation of the democratisation of school processes (democratic mandate).

As some countries have embarked on the combat to school failure and dropout, the demands placed on the production of academic excellence were intensified, in a clear adherence to the cult of a particular meritocracy (McNamee & Miller, 2004; Dench, Ed., 2006). Studies on the meaning of merit and the role of schools in its construction multiplied, arriving at different positions regarding the centrality of the meritocratic ideology in the processes of education regulation (Daverne & Ducterq, 2008; Duru-Bellat, 2009; Michaud, 2009; Dutercq & Daverne, 2009; Tenret, 2011; Daverne & Dutercq, 2013). On the other hand, the debate expands internationally in order to assess the effects of this agenda in the elitisation processes of education (Van Zanten, Ball & Darchy-Koechlin, eds., 2015; Maxwell & Aggleton, 2016; Blackmore, 2016). Inserted in this broader framework, the Portuguese teaching system presents some difficulties in reconciling the mandates that are now required to it.

The development of institutional marketing strategies from the perspective of school principals, the reasons inherent to the choice of school by the students and its framing in the policies conducive to the valuation of merit, are reflective dimensions that guided this text on the issue of accountability in education.

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